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The End of Wall Street

The story of the Wall Street collapse -- from the roots of the mortgage bubble to the US government's unprecedented response -- as told by America's most trusted business journalist.

The End of Wall Street is a blow-by-blow account of America's biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression. With grace, wit, and razor-sharp understanding, Roger Lowenstein tells the full story of the end of Wall Street as we knew it.

Drawing on 180 interviews, including sit-downs with top government officials and Wall Street CEOs, Lowenstein weaves a financial, economic, and sociological thriller that indicts America for succumbing to the siren song of easy debt and speculative mortgages. He etches laser-like profiles of all the key players, provides a damning explication of how rating agencies helped giftwrap faulty loans in the guise of triple-A paper, and dismantles the academic formulas that -- once again -- proved the ruin of investors and banks.

The End of Wall Street is rife with historical lessons and bursting with fast-paced action. Displaying Lowenstein's unmatched ability to make complicated financial stories resonate with the ordinary reader, it is essential reading as we work to identify the lessons of the market failure and start to rebuild.

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"The market system itself had come undone. Banks couldn't borrow; investors wouldn't lend; companies could not refinance." ????? With these two sentences, we know the book is meant to mislead, misdirect and misinform. Banks couldn't borrow because interbank loans froze given that many banksters finally realized that hundreds of trillions of dollars of ultra-leveraged debt had been written agains minimal amounts of capital on hand, while many trillions, again perhaps hundreds of trillions in possible payouts, had been written in unregulated insurance, i.e., credit default swaps, especially nakded swaps or uncovered swaps. Lowenstein may be a Wall Street insider (?) but you won't find out any real information from this hack. [And no, a 3% mortgage foreclosure rate in America did not bring down the global economy.]